Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @05:09AM
from the bring-back-a-shiny-souvenier-for-the-kids dept.

Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that Ukraine plans to open up the sealed zone around the Chernobyl reactor to visitors who wish to learn more about the tragedy that occurred nearly a quarter of a century ago. Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Yulia Yershova says experts are developing travel routes that will be both medically safe and informative. 'There are things to see there if one follows the official route and doesn't stray away from the group,' says Yershova. Though it is a very sad story.' The ministry also says it hopes to finish building a new safer shell for the exploded reactor by 2015 that will cover the original iron-and-concrete structure hastily built over the reactor that has been leaking radiation, cracking and threatening to collapse. About 2,500 employees maintain the remains of the now-closed nuclear plant, working in shifts to minimize their exposure to radiation and several hundred evacuees have returned to their villages in the area despite a government ban."

Some people seem to think that if you don't instantly die, then everything's fine. Never mind if incidence of cancer or birth deformities sky-rocketed for people in areas of radioactive fall-out, if people's heads aren't exploding, it's "Green Hysteria."

I'd love to visit the place, mind you. I hear that their restaurants serve a lovely leg of fish.

The reality is more people die each year on the road outside my window (the A14, in the UK) than due to all the after-effects of Chernobyl put together.

The effects of Chernobyl are not limited to higher cancer rates for people. They also encompassed destruction of agricultural land, even Saami reindeer herds, by winds blowing north on that fateful April day. Some car accidents on your local motorway doesn't destroy thousands of people's livelihoods over a fairly broad swath of northern Europe.

FWIW, I support nuclear power and always point out to Greens that this particular accident was due to human error and faulty design, a level of risk that modern reactors don't run. But let's not pretend Chernobyl was inconsequential.

Chernobyl was not inconsequential, but the facts are:
1) the (too huge) number of dead people is comparable to the number of people dead in car accidents
2) the nasty effects on the ecosystem are inferior to the positive effect of the departure of humans.

If we care mostly on ecosystem, Chernobyl is far from the top list of ecological catastrophes.
The consequences are mostly on humans that had to leave or that have been killed or injured.

the nasty effects on the ecosystem are inferior to the positive effect of the departure of humans.

Are you saying what I think you're saying?

Yes he is. Some people take the view that all lives, animal and human, are equally valuable. From that perverse perspective it is a logical conclusion that the Chernobyl disaster was a good thing. The problem is that you also have to conclude that you are being very selfish if you fail to provide a habitat for fleas, lice, and parasitic worms. I just hope he practices what he preaches.

While any death is too many, there haven' really been very many deaths as a result of the accident. Cancer rates aren't above normal.

The only reasonable way to ascertain deaths is by looking at cancer rates over all. Every cancer in the area gets checked up to Chernobyl by the local populations, even things that in no way could be caused by Chernobyl.

The fact the their government decided to open Chernobyl for tourism is not surprising to me. I moved to from Ukraine in late 80s when I was still a teenager. We lived approximately 300 miles away from Chernobyl. Without any history of cancer in my family... a few years later... I was diagnosed with cancer, having gone through number of surgeries and treatments I'm now cancer free. I have to see my doctor every 6 months to make sure cancer is not back. My friend`s girlfriend was a dancer from one of those dance groups/bands in Ukraine, she came to visit in US. One day she wasn't feeling good and went to the doctor... needless to say, she was diagnosed with the latest stage of cancer- untreatable and died a couple of weeks later. She was 25 and guess what, nobody in her family had a history of cancer until after Chernobyl disaster.What do I think about Chernobyl ? I think former Soviet government F***ed-UP big time prior to the disaster as it was preventable. People that worked for the government at the time that were honest and spoke up, well, the government sent those people to Chernobyl for cleanup, most if not All of those people are dead now. Hundreds of thousands of people that live in Ukraine and Russia are diagnosed with cancer and hundreds of thousands of people have already died.This wasn't anything that would have an afteraffects of a nuke, this was much greater. So, what do i think about people that decide to visit Chernobyl ? I think that they are nothing short of Idiots. Hopefully people that are considering to visit Chernobyl will wake up one day and decide to stop taking the Stupid Pills.

Yes, they are safe from that brand of faulty design. No reactor used anywhere else in the world has a large positive void coefficient and nothing else uses that insane design of control rods. Then add in other stuff like a containment building.

Even the 11 remaining reactors of that same design had those flaws fixed.

Safe as an absolute? No. Safe as in vastly safer and less dangerous than the reactor at Chernobyl? Yes - easily. And don't forget that even Chernobyl, rickety pile of bolts that it was, only failed because people deliberately overrode the safety mechanisms.

A good point, except that incidence of cancer or birth deformities did not sky-rocket.

You are aware that the most contaminated areas were all evacuated? Might as well make the argument that poisoning a river isn't harmful because people have to go and drink from a different river. Even so, there are estimates of around 4,000 people dying from cancers caused by the fallout.

And I love the traditional "more people die on the roads" variant. Really? Thousands die on the stretch of road outside your window each year? What - do you room mate with Godzilla or something?

A good point, except that incidence of cancer or birth deformities did not sky-rocket. On any time scale. Your information has come from environmentalists who exaggerate the figures by a factor of ten.

The reality is more people die each year on the road outside my window (the A14, in the UK) than due to all the after-effects of Chernobyl put together.

Ironically, the reason the A14 is so dangerous is that car-hating enviroists keep diverting the funds to improve it onto stupid "alternative" transportation schemes.

The WHO appears to disagree:

A large increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer has occurred among people who were young children and adolescents at the time of the accident and lived in the most contaminated areas of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. This was due to the high levels of radioactive iodine released from the Chernobyl reactor in the early days after the accident....In Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine nearly 5 000 cases of thyroid cancer have now been diagnosed to date among children who were aged up to 18 years at the time of the accident.

I'm sick of people on both sides of this debate exaggerating. No, it didn't mean "instant radioactive death for ten thousand years", but pretending like it was a minor mix up and no one got hurt is simply silly and irresponsible.

Or type 3 - people who have a clue about the actual radiation levels there today. You'll take a higher dose of radiation on your flight over there and back than you will take during a day tour in the zone. The levels are high enough that living there on a full time basis isn't a good idea, but a day or two is fine.

What rubbish! Considering that there is the precedent of people living at the sites of two atomic bombs, nobody is going to make such a stupidly long prediction. I am willing to be proven wrong by a citation, but I can't see this will happen.

It is a shame that in order to complain about how environmental groups exaggerate, people have to make exaggerated claims themselves. It is hypocritical.

Wasn't that completely discredited as being entirely fake? From what I remember, the girl never went there in a motorcycle, couldn't have gotten one of those passes to enter the area, her father isn't a scientist, and it's quite likely she never took any of those pictures.

She certainly didn't drive her motorcycle through there, her father isn't a scientist, and she certainly isn't the only person to go there. She did, however, take the pictures. If I recall it turned out she just went on one of the many exclusion zone tours that have been going through there for years.

I am based in Kyiv and writing a book about Chornobyl for the Joseph Henry Press. Several sources have sent me links to the "Ghost Town" photo essay included in the last e-POSHTA mailing. Though it was full of factual errors, I did find the notion of lone young woman riding her motorcycle through the evacuated Zone of Alienation to be intriguing and asked about it when I visited there two days ago.

I am sorry to report that much of Elena's story is not true. She did not travel around the zone by herself on a motorcycle. Motorcycles are banned in the zone, as is wandering around alone, without an escort from the zone administration. She made one trip there with her husband and a friend. They traveled in a Chornobyl car that picked them up in Kyiv.

She did, however, bring a motorcycle helmet. They organized their trip through a Kyiv travel agency and the administration of the Chornobyl zone (and not her father). They were given the same standard excursion that most Chernobyl tourists receive. When the Web site appeared, Zone Administration personnel were in an uproar over who approved a motorcycle trip in the zone. When it turned out that the motorcycle story was an invention, they were even less pleased about this fantasy Web site.

Because of those problems, Elena and her husband have changed the Web site and the story considerably in the last few days. Earlier versions of the narrative lied more blatantly about Elena taking lone motorcycle trips in the zone. That has been changed to merely suggest that she does so, which is still misleading.

I would not normally bother to correct someone's silly Chornobyl fantasy. Indeed, correcting all the factual errors and falsehoods in "Ghost Town" would consume as much space as the Web site itself. But the motorcycle story was such an outrageous fiction that I thought the readers of e-Poshta should know.

New Information, added Sep 19 / 04
from xxx@aol.com
Hey this is too much trouble to get logged in to your website to make a posting. I have known Elena for years, so I know how much is fake and how much is true. I know that her birthday is Feb 24, 1974, so she is 30 and not 26. I know that she cannot even ride a bike. the bike is her ex husbands. She has been divorced for 5 years. she can only ride a bicycle or little scooter.

Nothing.
There is little background radiation in most places and I'm pretty certain they'll want to avoid taking you to places with higher radiation if they want this tourism thing to last. Don't forget, there are people who *live* in that area and have lived for almost their entire life. So, a visit of a few days, so long as it does not involve taking you to any highly dangerous places, e.g. the core itself, should really be fine.

There is alot of background radiation, above normal levels, there. At reator #4, the one that blew, as soon as the doors to the vans opened the gieger counters went off. At that place it was around 5x normal levels. Most places were only 2x-3x unless you got near metal structure or some buildings.
When we got to the ferris wheel the guides stired up places where dust had collected due to rain water and that gave alarms of around 18x normal levels.
If you go by what we were told the amount of extra radiation we got from the day there was less then the amount of extra radiation a flight from NYC to Paris would of given.

Radiation is the least of the problems and there's really nothing that could go wrong with it. OTOH, the zone has grown very wild and desolate, and is not really a safe place to be in. Rabies is common in wild animals (and there is a major population of them), the buildings, roa

I wonder if "nicholas22" is in fact the guy selling the tour tickets ? People like that are either remarkably stupid or phenomenally ignorant!
The area is contaminated for hundreds of miles away from Chernobyl, going directly near the place of a readioactive fallout, well, that`s nothing short of idiocy! Scientists state that they have discovered a link between Chernobyl and cancer in younger patients in Italy. Hell, if people are affected in Italy, you`d think going directly to Chernobyl may not be healthy

Well, if you're in a sealed bus probably not that much. For years after the disaster, they used to make guards stand in the rain inside the exclusion zone, keeping regular people out and letting the workers who ran the remaining operational reactors in. Now that is a sucky job.

I know that the most interesting places will be the apartment buildings and other structures where the cold war era artifacts are left untouched. I hope that they stay that way, and don't get sanitised or removed by tourists. The first tour of the area will probably be the best.

I know that the most interesting places will be the apartment buildings and other structures where the cold war era artifacts are left untouched. I hope that they stay that way, and don't get sanitised or removed by tourists. The first tour of the area will probably be the best.

Is that because you'll get use to the green glow in a short time, or because it will be your last tour of anything?

I was there in July, part of the "illegal"(yea sure since the government gets a portion of the fee) tours.
Most places are in ruins and falling apart, anything of value has been stripped from inside the building. You do have large soviet items that are to big to haul away, that are left. What you get in the building are books, bottles, desks,etc.
You have to worry about nails, broken glass, etc. So I am afraid the government will clean up the area put down carpeting and ropes and make it museum instead of place you have wander around. However as it is I would guess the government is going to close down the private tours and control the whole thing, they will advertise it more and take bus loads of people instead of the smaller vans currently used.
that said it was one of the best tours I have ever been on, and will probably go again, would like to do one of the overnight tours so I can get farther into the city.
One other thing about them doing this is that Kyiv is the location of some upcoming European football tournament so they are having lots of people coming and doing lots of upgrades and contructions, new airport, new hotels etc. As it is Kyiv is not that tourist friendly but is a great place to go to now.

The problem I think is deciding what "it" is. The state of the area on 13 December 2010? What happens if a tourist breaks off a piece of something / steals something? do you put a replica in its place? What happens if there is heavy snowfall this year or rainstorms and these threaten to damage the soviet murals in the buildings or even collapse a roof of a building. Do you let them collapse, rebuild them, actively preserve them in some state?

This is the dilemma - what is the state you want to keep things in? Clearly the place has been touched by people, weather, and wildlife since (1986 was it?) - there's decay, graffitti, some stuff has been moved or stolen. What are your feelings? is it a tourist park, or a memorial, or other? Historians and cultural experts all have opinions about this.

Close to home, in the town I live in, Bletchley Park also has this issue to a small degree. They are always struggling for money but one question they have to think about is what state to preserve the place. A lot of the the famous codebreaking huts are in really poor condition - but then they were only designed as temporary wooden buildings to last a few years in the war. Now 70 years on their cheap constructions are falling apart. Do we freeze them somehow? tear them down and build replicas (but maybe to higher quality so they last longer and can survive tourists)? Do we save what is left and incorporate some of that original material alongside new material (replacing rotten wood, etc?

A big challenge for cultural preservation everywhere. What is the purpose of the Chernobyl area? What do you do when the buildings become unsafe because the weather has got in and they are in danger of falling down?

Obviously do both. Its an accumulation of little artifacts not one individual artifact. You could have fun and maintain every other building and let every other building decay, plus or minus the collapse footprint.

Neither by the public, nor by those who have the care of public monuments, is the true meaning of the word restoration understood. It means the most total destruction which a building can suffer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed. Do not let us deceive ourselves in this important matter; it is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture.

In it's current state is part memorial part tourist site and part educational site.
By wrecking it I would probably mean cleaning it up, proping items up and making it safe for a 3 year olds to run around.
the place is interesting because of the way nature has been destroying it. Places are collapsing and in the Pripyay hotel you even have a tree growing in the floor the top level old bar.
As for what will happen as the building fall and become unsafe they will no longer be visited, and marked as unsafe.

There have been tourist trips to Chernobyl for over a decade already. I was there this summer.

Pripyat is already wrecked, since there have been a lot of looters going through the area. Our guide told us that the apartment buildings are completely stripped by now, even the toilet seats are gone.

We visited an abandoned school as well. The old swimming pool area had obviously been used by kids who went there to drink Vodka and smash the place.

Based on that website, I had played with the idea of getting in there myself for years. Lack of funds and lack of a motorcycle made the idea remain... an idea.
However, I would be more inclined to explore thar fairly vast territory by myself, not in a big safe can with 30 strangers and following a predefined path. It would be just like looking at 3D documentaries, sans the comfort.

well "traveller", as in "hey man, I am a traveller, not a tourist!" - means a tourist with pretensions.

I had great fun backpacking round the world and telling the international hippy set that I was most definitely a tourist, not a "traveller'. Either you live somewhere, or you're just touring through it, or you're popping in for a quick look.

And yup, most of the time you're a fish out of water and a total idiot. But hey, we all got to get along. I put up with dumb Americans in my neighbourhood and gently tr

Some friends of mine did a tour through there - to within ~200 metres of the reactor 'sarcophagus' a few months ago. These tours have been running for years now form several different operators. Look up any travel website or just google 'chernobyl tours' and you'll find plenty about this.

I read the article but still can't understand WTF it's about when you consider these tours have been going on for years.

I went with Tour Kiev and it was great.
The way it works is that all those companies funnel you to the same location and same tour. You are picked up in Kyiv and watch movies for the drive. Once there you pick up some local government people who are your tour guides.
After your 5 hours there they leave and you are driven back to Kyiv.
Do it quickly, with this action the tours are going to probably going to become more disneyfied. Also some european football tournament is taking place there next year or 2012 and that will bring lots of people.
I stayed at Hotel Ukraine(in independece square) get a junior suite and facing the square. One of the most interesting trips I have ever done. The place is not tourist friendly, lack of signs pointing to major sites, lack of "tourist" events, etc.

AFAIK, the zone is already open for tourists. In guided tours, with authorized guides, the tour takes at most a day, visitors are screened for radiation levels upon entering and exitting and the guide has an active geiger counter at all times (which is one of major attractions too). At least a few travel agencies in Poland and Ukraine offer these tours (e.g. link [bispol.com])

The route, time and organization of these tours really minimizes all radiation-related danger to bare minimum and as long as you follow the guide, there is no risk of overexposure whatsoever. (still, the free-roaming of Pripyat part of the tour, on the other hand, has a considerable risk of getting hurt by parts of ruined buildings.)

The zone is in major part uncontaminated and totally harmless (save for rabid wolves, collapsing roofs of houses, getting lost and freezing to death, wild boars and the likes) but there are still many smaller or bigger patches of more radioactive areas - not radioactive enough to harm you if you cross in a car or even walking at a fast pace, but enough to mean somewhat heightened cancer risk if you camp there for a night. Generally, if you have a geiger counter and an inch of brain to follow what it says, radiation is not a danger - the count rises, you turn around. If you are an experienced hiker and have some rudimentary means of defense from wild animals, you can spend weeks in the zone just fine.

Generally, obtaining permission to enter the zone is not very hard. Many Airsoft groups organize their games there for example. Which areas you are allowed to enter and for how long, is a different matter. You get day permissions at most for Pripyat, but for example, the far west of the zone is pretty open and accessible - the standard 30km perimeter around the power plant has been extended about 30km more to the east-north-east where one of two major clouds of contamination struck. That cloud was long, wide, but more stretched, so the levels near that border of the zone have already dropped to entirely safe levels by now and getting a prolonged permit for that area is not a problem at all.

I highly recommend reading the book _Wolves Eat Dogs_ by Martin Cruz Smith for a fictionalized account of chasing criminals thru the Zone of Exclusion. Lots of details about radiation, residents who stayed, and the disaster itself. Don't know how close it is to truth of course. Disclaimer: he's my favorite mystery writer.

I got to see a presentation given by a nuclear scientist who went there last year on a vacation - it can be done, but it takes at least one person in the tour that speaks decent Russian. Wild pictures - growing up at the end of the Cold War, seeing an abandoned, looted Soviet-era city is a little creepy.

Scratch that, a whole bunch of creepy.

The guy doing the presentation had his own geiger counter, and was showing just how hot some areas of Chernobyl still were. It was wild stuff, and sobering...

No it does not. There are tours that go there most days out of Kyiv. A little over $100 US and off you go. For around $400 USD,IIRC, you can have a private tour. It is all in english, other languages are available.
Check out www.tourkiev.com

Touring Chernobyl is like walking across a freeway blindfolded, because it's okay, you can't hear any cars.

You see:

(1) The "Quiet Prius" prob: You basic inexpensive Geiger counter, for durability, has a thickish diaphragm over its sensor, which blocks alpha and beta radiation. The element of most concern is Plutonium, which is an Alpha emitter. So, as listening for traffic is not very efficacious at discerning quiet cars, a geiger counter is of no help, indeed, it's less than helpful.

(2) The "Quiet on the average" prob: It does not help that traffic sounds quiet. All it takes is one car to send you flying. Similarly, it does not matter that the radiation level is, on the average, low. All it takes is one particle of Plutonium, nestled against a lung cell, to start a cancer. The cell does not care that averaged over a day, over your whole body, you just picked up a millirad. All it knows is that an alpha particle just smashed into its DNA and caused a mutation. Yes, DNA has some self-repair mechanisms but they're not foolproof.

(3) The "Ivana made it okay" prob-- it does not matter that some dame allegedly snapped some pics years ago. She may be dead or dying now. Plus we will never know how many folks took a similar trip but are now too sick or too dead to post their pics.

(4) The "But Ivan made it across" prob-- It does not matter that your tour guide has been there a dozen times-- You don't know how many other guides are now in the Kiev Home for Comrades With Bad Coughs Who Eventually Keel Over.

Maybe the analogy isn't so bad. Think about whether you'd walk across a quiet freeway before you sign up for this trip.

Your analogy is stupid. Just because you don't understand the risks of a short visit to Chernobyl doesn't mean that everyone else is as clueless. For example, for point 1, just buy a geiger detector that picks up alpha particles. Problem solved.

Second, a highway has clearly defined borders. There's no similar border between the land near the cask at Chernobyl and your lungs wherever in the world you happen to be. Third, any plutonium from Chernobyl has had decades to chemically bind in Earth's highly reactive environment. Fourth, you're probably taking risks right now, such as driving or taking a shower, which are probably far more dangerous to your long term health than a little time at Chernobyl.

Finally, no matter where you are on Earth's surface, you are in a high radiation environment. Right this minute you are exposed to scary, dangerous stuff like cosmic rays, radon and other uranium and thorium decay products, and even some long term decay products from the nuclear bomb tests and large scale nuclear accidents like Chernobyl. What makes a trip to Chernobyl even slightly increase your risk of dying from scary, dangerous radiation?

(1) The "Quiet Prius" prob: You basic inexpensive Geiger counter, for durability, has a thickish diaphragm over its sensor, which blocks alpha and beta radiation. The element of most concern is Plutonium, which is an Alpha emitter.

(2) The "Quiet on the average" prob: It does not help that traffic sounds quiet. All it takes is one car to send you flying. Similarly, it does not matter that the radiation level is, on the average, low. All it takes is one particle of Plutonium

All it takes is one cosmic ray, or one decay from an atom of phosphorous in a banana, etc. etc. Risk is proportional to dose. It's managable.

(3) The "Ivana made it okay" prob-- it does not matter that some dame allegedly snapped some pics years ago. She may be dead or dying now. Plus we will never know how many folks took a similar trip but are now too sick or too dead to post their pics.

If we can estimate the exposure, we can calculate exactly how many people we'd expect to get cancer from such an expedition. Again risk is proportional to dose.

Ah. A vacation that leaves you with a nice healthy glow! What could be better!But seriously, sign me up. The research possibilities are endless. All the sci-fi mutant stuff of "S.t.a.l.k.e.r" aside, seeing how life responds and adapts to that type of environment is fascinating.

A few years back there was a great HD documentary on the wildlife returning to the area. They followed the lives of several animals (I think a cat and a wolf for one). Wildlife is doing very well, but apex predators are accumulating large doses of radiation from being at the top of the food chain. Who knows what effects that will have, but I was amazed at how well the ecosystem rebounded. I guess I was expecting a Mad Max landscape.

It's not that radioactive in most of the zone anymore. Even if you spent a full day in the most radioactive accessible area (~200m from the actual remains of the reactor), you'd take about 120 microsieverts of radiation (about 5% of your normal annual background exposure) or a little less than the exposure from 2 transatlantic flights.

In other words, you will take on more radiation flying there than you will touring the zone.